An Adventure in Ancestral Healing
How I learned to bring grace to the shadows in my family history and enjoy being Lightbearer for my genetic lineage.
Chapter 1 - The Queen
Memory fragment 1 - Cloncurry Racetrack, outback Queensland, Australia, around 1977. I’m in the grandstand alone on race day, playing around the long wooden bench seats. I look up and see an older indigenous woman who’s sitting alone, dressed up for the races in a print frock with necklace and mid-heeled pumps. Her hair is styled like white women do their hair - in short waves. Her skin is very dark. I’m fascinated. I’ve seen full blood Aboriginal stockmen before, but no women. She’s styled herself after the Queen of England, but her skin is a very different colour.
I’m staring at her, completely captivated, until I notice her glance at me and shift in her seat. I’d like to sit down and talk to her, but I’ve been warned about talking to strangers. Then I suddenly realise I’m being rude and making her feel uncomfortable, so I feel embarrassed and run away.
Memory fragment 2 - my sister and I are playing in the backyard of our house in the grass plains of North West Queensland, around 1977. Our house yard is a patch of green surrounded by burned-yellow Mitchell grass and black dirt. I say, “Let’s be aborigines”. So we find sticks to make spears, and gather leaves and seed pods from the trees in the yard. We carefully arrange the treasures in a strip of bark just wide enough to form a container.
I’ve felt very curious about the indigenous culture of my country for my whole life. Although I wanted to learn more, I never acted on that sense of intrigue and sought out indigenous people. As a child, I didn’t know where to start with the conflicting tangle of feelings that arose. As an adult, I felt that as a white Australian I had no right to intrude on a heritage that my ancestor’s culture almost destroyed.
Chapter 2 - The Grandmothers
In 2014, I had the opportunity to spend a weekend with Frank Ansell - a traditional indigenous healer (nungkari) and lawman of the Eastern Arrernte desert country of Central Australia. Unusually, Frank openly shares some of his ancient wisdom in an attempt to create a bridge of understanding between our cultures.
According to Frank, his grandfather told him “You go and teach those white fellas something about Aboriginal culture, or they’re going to kill us all”.
I sensed Frank might be able to help me work through my distrust of nature and the fear of living in my own body. I hoped he might have some techniques to help me become more present. And I thought perhaps he might hold the key to simplifying spiritual practice, so that it could become less structured and separate - more like a dynamic and ongoing movement towards life.
What I learned from Frank that weekend I can’t really capture using language. What I’ll say is that I got everything I thought I wanted, plus a few surprises. I loved that he taught us how to be our own shaman. I didn’t expect to discover that simply repeating “I am awesome” three times will strengthen your aura and feel great (try it yourself). I didn’t know Frank would be so cheeky, self-effacing and optimistic.
And I didn’t anticipate a healing in my own ancestral lineage… but that’s what happened, with some help from Frank’s co-facilitator.
“Call in your male lineage” he said. “Call in your father’s line”.
And they came - my father and his father and his father. And then two more came - the first of the line, the brothers who came to Australia on a ship in the mid-1800s.
At that point, I hadn’t seen a picture of the brothers. All I knew about them was that they’d acquired land and grown sugar cane, founding the two Australian branches of my father’s English family tree. But I knew enough about the history of this country to understand that the vast amount of land the brothers acquired would have been occupied by indigenous people, and at some point they most likely used force to get and keep the land.
(I’d felt strangely guilty about living here, without having any sense of the origin or explanation for the feelings, since I was a small child.)
On this day, sitting in the bush while on retreat with Frank, the brothers came and stood either side of me. As they appeared, a line of Aboriginal grandmothers stood in front of us. I heard the words “Don’t take the children”. And then I felt the grandmother’s grief. All I could think was: this is what it feels like when the Earth herself has her heart broken.
In response, the brothers poured out guilt and remorse and regret and shame. It came through my body as I heard them say the word “sorry”, over and over and over again. I wept for them, as them. My tears were part of their peace offering.
Incredibly, I felt the apology accepted. The flow of energy shifted from grief and shame to gratitude... and then it started flowing towards me. From both sides, I heard/sensed my role in the healing: this kind of trauma cannot be healed in spirit, so it has to be faced and transmuted within the body of someone who is in physical form on this planet.
Perhaps this is what Frank means when he says “You are your own living ancestor”.
A few weeks before, I’d asked to be shown how I could help heal the broken heart of my country. My request was answered with a clear directive to focus on healing my own heart and ancestral line first... because in doing that, we heal the whole. And I felt humbled by what I’d witnessed. I had never before encountered the generosity of spirit I felt from those grandmothers, who had been stripped of everything and forgave my ancestors anyway.
Chapter 3 - It Began With His Eyes
Standing in my father’s study in 2018, I looked at the grainy black and white photocopy of an old lithograph and all I could see were my ancestor’s eyes.
When I first saw the old picture, my aunt had just finished some genealogical research into the brothers. Pioneers in the region where that branch of our family comes from, the brothers had done very well for themselves in the late 1800s. They acquired and cleared vast stretches of land and were the first men to grow sugarcane in the district. My parents’ generation remembers them with pride.
One of the brothers, my direct ancestor, became a civic leader. He was mayor of a thriving local town. My aunt had found words about his life and one of those early sepia portraits.
When I read the article, I noticed a line that caused me to pause: “They used South Sea Islander labour in their canefields.”
Even with my limited knowledge of cane farming, I knew what that meant. The so-called Kanaka labourers were 60,000+ men and women taken or coerced from Pacific Islands in the 1800s, then enslaved or indentured on Queensland cane farms.
When I looked again at that photograph, all I could focus on were his eyes. They were the eyes of a hard man. It felt like something calculating stared back at me.
2018 was also the year I came back to live in the town where I was born (but had left aged three). The obvious reason for coming back was that my sister was here with her kids and needed some more support, and I wanted to get to know her children while they were young.
But I also sensed there was something more to be done connected to the family history in this region, where my ancestor and his brother had been so successful.
I didn’t do any digging when I got here. I just waited for breadcrumbs to come to me, as I explored some interesting threads around diamond structures and the role of DNA in healing. I felt like I might be close to developing a new approach or even a healing modality of my own.
Chapter 4 - Diversion
In early 2019, I was out for a walk at 5:30am near my home, in a seaside village of about 500 people. I walked down to the tree-lined street that ran along the waterfront and stopped before crossing the road. No-one else was on the street.
There was a man - mid-40s, fit and strong - sitting on his front veranda at the house on the corner. He put his hand up and waved and I put my hand up and waved back and then he stood up and started walking towards his front gate. I could see that he was muttering, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
As he opened the front gate, he suddenly sprinted towards me. I was so shocked that I froze. When he was close enough that I could see his eyes, they looked completely black.
And then he punched me in the head. Shocked, I fell to the ground. He started kicking me in the ribs. And then I heard a faintly metallic voice - like it was coming out of a phone speaker - saying: “Steve, Steve STOP”. That’s when I realized that he was on a call with somebody and still holding the cellphone in his hand.
He stopped kicking me, turned around and walked away - saying into the phone: “She’s the devil.”
The thought I remember having was: “I need to be very careful here.” So I got up, limped home and called the police.
By the time the police arrived from the nearest station 20 minutes away, he had attacked his next door neighbour with a fence post. He fractured the man’s skull and broke his arm and nearly killed him. And I realised that could have been me.
There was terror while the attack happened, but afterwards all I could feel was numbness. Only somewhat aware of my state, I received a number of sessions that seemed supportive at the time. I felt “better” but didn’t want to work as a practitioner any more. So I got a job and stopped facilitating transformational work and told myself that was all completely fine.
Then COVID happened. I trained as a Non-Personal Awareness practitioner in 2022 and started facilitating transformational work again.
But it wasn’t until 2023 that I began to see how the attack activated all the prenatal trauma patterning that was still in my nervous system. And that the support I’d received had helped me move into a more functional freeze state, but did not actually help to resolve the underlying freeze pattern. It was like papering over deep cracks in a plaster wall.
I’ve since learned a lot about the signals of dissociation, and remedies that actually work… but that’s for another post.
Chapter 5 - Pay Attention, Now
In the first week of May 2025, I got an email from the local council about a lookout in the area that bore the name of my ancestor. It included a couple of paragraphs about him and a link to a newspaper article.
I clicked on the link.
Reading through the copy of the original newspaper article - part obituary, part description of his funeral - I noticed something unusual. There were two different services included in the same funeral ceremony, with two different people officiating. One was the local Anglican minister and the other was a senior official from the local Masonic Lodge. His pallbearers were also from the Masons. I realised he must have been quite a senior Freemason to be honoured in that way.
Three days after reading that email, I had the most profound healing shift of my life so far.
Chapter 6 - The Hidden Oath
I’d finally found a practitioner who could diagnose what was happening in my nervous system. Over Zoom, Benjamyn tuned in and sensed a lot of static and fragmentation (which I’d been somewhat aware of). I knew it was related to prenatal trauma that had been reactivated in the attack, because I could feel that part of me contracting whenever fear came up. But the contraction was proving very difficult to resolve with the tools I was trained to use.
As he facilitated some gentle work to help me see and allow and feel the contraction pattern, my mind and nervous system finally started to calm down. I have never felt so relieved after a session, because he actually had answers to my questions and a solution that worked.
The next morning I stood at the back of my house, looking at the trees and the rising Sun. As I’d been doing for the past couple of months, I connected to my own centre, to the Earth, to my higher self, to the Sun, and to the Milky Way.
Out of nowhere came a knowing that not only had my ancestor been a senior Mason, but that as part of an initiation to some fairly high degree of the order he’d made a commitment for his descendants to be “food” for the dark god that his branch of Freemasonry worshipped.
I realised that as long as I’d lived a conventional matrix life - working for the government, then in a corporate career, not rocking the boat - that counted as being “food” for that god. After I left my corporate career and immersed myself in false light, staying deep in the New Age rabbit hole for a few years, I was still in that cage.
But after I travelled to Montana in 2014 and had a soul initiation, everything changed. From that point onwards, I experienced relentless psychic attacks and “bad luck” that only seemed to get worse (not better) as I did more and more “healing” work.
That standing meditation outside my back door was a turning point. I did some work on the spot and over the next week to rescind, revoke, undo and unwind any vows, contracts, or agreements that my ancestor had made on behalf of his descendants.
A couple of weeks later, I went to stay with a friend to do a rose medicine ceremony. As we were debriefing, there was a very clear message that my process required another step to be complete - I needed to forgive my ancestor.
It’s an understatement to say I was pissed off with him, but I worked through the process of connecting with him and saying what I needed to say. Suddenly I sensed that he was stuck in a very painful, in-between place and had been waiting for someone (me) to release him. At that point, genuine forgiveness became easy.
The process felt complete and I congratulated myself, thinking “Wow, I’ve done a great thing for my family. It’s done.”
And then my digestion fell apart.
Chapter 7 - The Curse
A couple of months after the rose ceremony, my digestion completely collapsed. I tried all the physical, dietary, and supplement things but nothing worked. I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on.
I talked to my regular bodyworker about the ancestral stuff, and when I told her that my ancestor had used Kanaka labour, she said, “It feels like there’s another piece to this, and it involves the Kanakas.”
So I went to see a local shamanic bodyworker who I’d met a few months earlier. I explained what was happening. He put his hands on my belly and tuned in. After a few minutes of silence and gentle touch he said, “Okay, I can feel those South Sea Islanders. They cursed this man, and they’re still very angry. They don’t want to let it go.”
He said, “Give me a minute. I’m going to explain something to them.”
A few minutes later, he said, “I had to show them that as long as they stayed in judgment and condemnation - as long as they held on to that curse - they were also cursing their own descendants and holding them in a very unhappy place. Once I showed them that, they got it. They were able to let it go. It’s clearing now.”
He also said, “Somehow you’ve ended up holding some of this emotion in your large intestine. Let’s move that energy so it can leave.”
We spent the next hour helping my body let go of the stored energy and emotion. There was a reconciliation between me and the South Sea Islanders.
When we finished I realised the treatment room was very close to the old river port, where the boats would’ve docked with the South Sea Islanders when they were brought here. It seemed like the location was significant - as if it helped to be on the land there to close the open loop.
It took a couple of months for my digestion to repair, but now it’s better than ever before.
Chapter 8 - Full Circle
The final piece - which brings this story full circle - is that in 2026 I’m planning to move onto 50 acres in this region near one of the sugar mills. A few weeks ago I sat with one of the current owners, checking in with the land and whether I would be welcome there.
I sensed that it’s time for a descendant to live there with a new intention. Something can happen just by me having my feet on the ground, and my hands in the soil - with respect and honouring, instead of conquest and subjugation.
So that’s the next piece of my ancestry adventure. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Chapter 9 - What the Milky Way is Teaching Me
I’m convinced it’s not a coincidence that I started consciously connecting to the Earth, the Sun, and the Milky Way a couple of months before this ancestral story started to unfold in 2025.
Something in the conscious connection to the Milky Way is helping to shift the ancestral imprints and programs woven into our DNA. It’s like a gentle massaging, so the old residue can be released relatively easily, without force, in an organic, natural unfoldment (rather than a mind-driven “I’m going to heal this now!”)
This process demanded greater awareness of my body than I’d ever had before, and a greater level of mindful presence. It’s a different way of relating to my body, my human incarnation and my “healing journey”.
And even better: the process has opened up a sense of freedom and lightness - liberation from a heavy weight I hadn’t even realised I was carrying because until now, it was just part of me. Now that it’s not, I’m way more available for things that delight me.
But most importantly - I wasn’t ready to do this until now, because I didn’t have all the tools I needed until this year.
I’ve built a free quiz that can help you identify places where you’re leaking power inside your family system. Your results include my perspective on tinybrave moves you can make to truly own your role as Lightbearer for your genetic lineage.
big love
Belinda ❤️🔥